Give yourself artificial time pressure....
You'll be pressured to act...
you'll feel obligated
Pay the price of procrastination...
This sounds like a list of ways to make your life worse, not better, especially if you're a chronic procrastinator. If you're a chronic procrastinator, increasing pressure increases procrastination, rather than decreasing it.
These sorts of approaches are much more useful for optimists than pessimists, as optimists won't treat any failures as personal or devastating, and they won't experience risk paralysis.
But chronic procrastinators already assign so much personal blame and social shame to even trivial failures, that for them these approaches would be like recommending that alcoholics drink more as a way of getting sober. That is, it's more of precisely what they already have way too much of.
Yea, I think you're right.
Dealing with chronic procrastinators is a completely different issue.
People have been encouraging me to share my anti-akrasia tricks, but it feels inappropriate to dedicate a top-level post solely to unproven techniques that work for some person and may not work for others, so:
Go ahead and share your anti-akrasia tricks!
Let's make it an open thread where we just share what works and what doesn't, without worrying (yet) about having to explain tricks with deep theories, or designing proper experiments to verify them. However, if you happen to have a theory or a proposed experiment in mind, please share.
Bragging is fine, but please share the failures of your techniques as well – they are just as valuable, if not more.
Note to readers – before you read the comments and try the tricks, keep in mind that the techniques below are not yet
provensupported or explained by proper experiments, and are not yet backed by theory. They may work for their authors, but are not guaranteed to work for you, so try them at your own risk. It would be even better to read the following posts before rushing to try the tricks: